The Chocolate Falcon Fraud Read Online Free

sympathetically.
    â€œIs there any way a staff member could check the room? Make sure he’s all right?”
    â€œI’ll ask the manager.”
    The manager wasn’t happy, but he got a special key card from a drawer. I didn’t ask if I could go along. I just went.
    The room was on the third floor. I tried to follow the manager inside, but he gestured at me. “Please stay here.”
    So I stood in the doorway, though I did manage to edge inside far enough to see into the bathroom and most of the bedroom. By then I had talked myself into real concern about Jeff’s disappearance, and I was holding my breath as the manager made a circuit of the room, checking behind the shower curtain, between the beds, in the closet. I felt a genuine sense of relief when he spoke. “No sign of him.”
    â€œThank goodness.” From my place two steps inside the room I could see Jeff’s luggage—a medium-sized wheeled duffel bag—on the foot of the bed. I could peek inside the bathroom and see his shaving kit on the counter. But neither bag looked as if it had been opened.
    Jeff had apparently checked in the previous day, dropped off his luggage, then left. There was no sign that he had ever come back to the room.
    The manager relocked the door, and I followed him downstairs. He seemed even more relieved than I was, and I could understand why. As Hogan had said, motels don’t like dead guests.
    When we returned to the front desk, I tried one more thing. “Do I need to give you a credit card? To make sure Jeff’s room is paid for?”
    Then the manager
did
look relieved. To learn that somefamily member was willing to pick up Jeff’s bill—he practically clicked his heels. But he assured me that Jeff had a credit card on file. All was well.
    â€œI’ll just call his mother,” I said.
    The manager frowned. “I thought you were his mother.”
    I chuckled. “No, his stepmother. We’re a blended family.” I ended with another chuckle.
    That reassured him, and he didn’t make any objection when I helped myself to a cup of their free coffee, then took a seat in the empty breakfast area. I took out my phone.
    And Tess walked in the front door of the motel.

Chapter 3

    At least I thought it was Tess. Like Jeff, she was almost four years older than the last time I’d seen her, and like him, she had changed in the years between eighteen and twenty-two.
    The girl approaching the registration desk was tiny—I’d guess her jeans at size zero—with dark hair in a wispy haircut. She used quick, birdlike gestures that reminded me of the Tess I’d met three and a half years earlier. I stood up, more and more confident that this was Tess.
    She had a clear, high-pitched voice. From thirty feet away I could understand what she asked the clerk.
    â€œDo y’all have a Jeff Godfrey registered here?”
    It was definitely Tess.
    The clerk, understandably, looked surprised. Jeff Godfrey must be her most popular guest that afternoon. She hesitated, and her eyes flickered in my direction.
    Tess spoke again. “Jeffrey Godfrey? Or J. A. Godfrey? From Dallas, Texas?”
    I decided to let the clerk off the hook. “Tess! Tess! I didn’t know you came to Michigan, too.”
    I would say that Tess looked happy to see me. And I was truly happy to see her. Tess was a close friend of Jeff’s. She was a sweet girl, and she was sure to know how to contact Jeff.
    Tess came over, and we exchanged big Texas hugs. I had to lean way over, since I was close to a foot taller than Tess, but I managed to handle my crutch. At least I didn’t fall over, and I gave a brief explanation of my injury, assuring her it was minor.
    For a few minutes, we went on gushing the way Texas girls do. Tess told me she had finished at SMU a month earlier, earning a degree in sociology. Like Jeff, she was to enter graduate school at the University of Texas in